It might be something in the soil or it might be the drinking water, but America's senior choreographers seem to have inherited all the stamina and sinew of their country's founding pioneers.
The late Martha Graham made her final work at 96, Merce Cunningham is still scintillatingly productive at 83 and Paul Taylor, a stripling at 72, opens his London season with a programme in which two of the works were created during the last year.
In The Beginning, Taylor's re-telling of the Adam and Eve story, issues from the unique comic strip compartment of this choreographer's fantasy life. It cheerily swaps all the sin of the original narrative for a domestic farce in which a grumpily punitive Jehovah banishes Adam and Eve to an ordeal of painful parenting and squabbling kids.
Ultimately though its jokes wear thin and the real revelation is Taylor's other new work, Promethean Fire. It's easy to see why American critics have seen echoes of September 11 in this fiercely choreographed rite of destruction and rebirth.
The vaunting lines and scattering energies of its opening section collapse shockingly into a sprawl of limbs, the handsome chiaroscuro lighting turns inferno red and images of desolation modulate via a redemptive duet into a finale of collective hopefulness.
Rarely, in fact, has Taylor converted sound into dance patterns of such blinding clarity and inevitability. The staggered symmetries, choral groupings and solo threads of his choreography unfurl with a necessity that feels like a physical matter of life and death.
This is a huge piece of dance - at once blazing and massive - and it requires no external reference to explain its power.
The 16-strong cast, led by Patrick Corbin and Lisa Viola, dance it with awesome authority yet the company are equally convincing in Taylor's ever popular Company B.
As the dancers jitterbug and polka to the 1940s soundtrack of the Andrews Sisters they transform into a generation of cocky, candy cute innocents, even while delicately stressing Taylor's poignant subtext that this was also a generation of lambs led to the slaughter of the second world war.
These are superb grownup performers who give a 20/20 clarity to the still extraordinary variety of their choreographer's vision.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7863 8000. UK tour opens at The Swan High Wycombe on May 6 - box office 01494 512000
